Coda
by Siavahda
Summary: Spoilers for City of Heavenly Fire. Love from an unexpected quarter gives Jonathan a second chance.


She has been elsewhere, because her son desired to take Edom's thrones on his own merit, without her help, and she respected that. More, she approved. She has been mother to many, and she knows the value of letting the bold, beautiful ones stretch their wings and claim their first kingdoms alone.

After they prove themselves, they are hers forever. But that first time, though she may give them the small aids they ask for – like her blood in an _adamas_ cup on a dark night – they rise or fall alone.

But when she feels Jonathan Morgenstern struck down, she realises that she cannot let this one fall. Not this one, last-born and best-loved, the son not of her body but of her soul, her heart. Her dark star in a mortal's skin.

She flies to him, and it is nothing, nothing at all, to whisk him away from the arms of the human broodmare who bore him, to replace his body with a changeling of hawthorn and roses in the faerie style. She makes the switch so smoothly that none notice, and she is older than the stars of their world; not even the Voyance runes on their hands will pierce the illusion on the false corpse she leaves with them.

She cradles the embers of her son's life in moss gathered in Zion, saving them as stone-age mortals saved their fires; she catches his last breath in her hands like a butterfly of spun glass and seals it behind his teeth, holding it there as her power sweeps through his fragile, beautiful body in a blazing wave – mending, repairing, binding what is broken. She stitches his internal hurts with gold threaded through the crescent moon of a dead world; soothes the burn of heavenly fire with water from the river Pison. She weaves the last feathers from her lost wings with starfire and wraps the whole around his heart, and it catches like a bonefire, he gasps awake and sucks his last breath back into his lungs and he _lives._

His eyes are green now. His gaze is a jade blade to her heart, because she knows what the colour means.

"Oh, son," she whispers. She holds him cradled in her lap, and she brushes her hand over his hair. The motion weaves a spell and his eyes flutter closed, cocooning him in gentle dreams and giving her time to think.

They call her the mother of monsters, Lilith, and it is true, but what the mortals never understood was that she loves her monsters, every one of them. All who are spurned and abandoned, the ugly and the evil, the souls deemed unfit for the Creator's approval; she loves them all. They are hers. As Jonathan is hers, but his eyes are green and she knows he will never take her blood again, not even to kill the pain she cannot heal.

She would return him to his mortal family, but she does not trust them with him. The Nephilim's Clave would almost certainly execute him, and if they did not – if they did not, then the guilt of his actions would destroy him. It is a ridiculous emotion, guilt, but his eyes shine like grass beneath sunlight now, and she will not take that from him without his consent.

Which leaves her with only a single option.

The working takes only moments. As Asmodeus stole the vampire's memories, so does Lilith take her son's – but far more gently, unspooling a lifetime's worth from Jonathan with the utmost care. She is the one who stole the name of God and worked the first spell; she is a better worker of magic than her consort, and she does not unmake her son as Asmodeus did Simon. Asmodeus undid all the work, rewound a statue to its original hunk of marble; she takes the paint, the colour, but leaves the worked stone as it is. She smooths away all the marks Valentine left on him, from the scars on his back to the ones in his heart, while leaving him still himself. Then she takes the marks _she_ has left on him, that her blood has left on him; the power, yes, but also the nightmares, the horror, the guilt. She clears the calcified neurons in his brain and rejuvenates the empathic workways withered by her gifts, watches him blossom in her Othersight, the glorious midnight-sky of his soul flooding with gold and pink and blue like a dawn. She leaves him Nephilim and only Nephilim, the Shadowhunter that, in a thousand other worlds, he was supposed to be.

A single tear falls as she works, and she places the memories she has taken from him in it. She freezes it and strings it on silver and places it around her neck, the gem resting at the hollow of her throat, and weeps no more.

When it is done, she lifts him in her arms – still asleep; she would not wake him for this – and steps away from Edom. She does not notice his weight, and yet it is one of the heaviest burdens she has ever had to bear as she walks between the worlds, searching for just the right combination of factors, just the right haven for her son's reborn heart.

She finds it far from his original dimension, but she finds it.

When she manifests within it, it is night. The stars are a scattering of silver coins on black velvet, and the moon is absent, but there is enough light to gleam on the windows of the Fairchild manor. Lilith would have broken through the wards of Alicante if necessary, but the house is outside the city proper, as are most of its kind. There is nothing to stop her from walking up to the front door, her son's head against her heart, and using her power to raise the winged door-knocker.

She lifts it, and lets it fall.

She only knocks once, but it is enough; Nephilim sleep lightly. Within moments she hears movement inside the house, and too soon the door is swung open.

"Jocelyn Graymark," Lilith says, addressing the red-haired woman who cries out at the sight of her burden, "I return to you your son."


End file.
